7 Answers
7

I was one of the first people to beat endurance mode (level 1337) on Armor Games' leaderboards. It's not that hard once you have it set up right.

I'll re-paste the mini-guide I posted on JIG here:

The first key is to get a gem that is Yellow-Orange-Lime... in a trap. You'll have to 8x-Amp a single tower for a while before you have a high enough gem, but once your YOL gem is about grade 12 or 13 you can put it in front of the entrance and instantly fill your mana bar with dead monsters.

The second key is to use Giants Only and summon as many as you can handle each wave while you're still setting up. For me, it was 1 gem grade per 10 waves, so 1-10 is a grade 1 gem, 11-20 is grade 2, etc. You make a huge profit by doing this, since the giants are worth so much per kill. Do not summon after 160 or so, since the natural HP of the creeps quickly starts to climb to 3.33 billion. The nice thing about this is that the max natural creep HP stays at 3.33 billion for the rest of the game.

Why do you want a yellow gem? Does orange's mana return act as a function of damage done?
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Raven Dreamer♦May 1 '11 at 2:54

Yellow scales up very well for damage. Without Yellow and Lime, you'll have to have a MUCH higher level gem to do the same amount of damage
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HyppyMay 1 '11 at 3:52

Wow, Great tip! I played a game with this strategy. I removed all my gems. My mana was stillclimbing very fast even if many monsters were banished. I would have to wait a couple of hours if I didn't waste my mana for bombimg monsters.
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Luc MNov 26 '11 at 0:56

When I play all armored endurance, I get 3 areas set up:
Mana farm: a line of amped traps with orange - lime - blue, ususally level x orange, level (x-1) lime and (x-1) blue, mix the lime blue then mix into the orange. (ex. mix a lime 2 with blue 2, making a l3, mix with an orange3 to make a OLB4. This chain hits mana gain while holding them there for a while. It will not do much damage later on, but that's not it's main function (to gather mana).

The Killzone: a line of towers with amps on both sides. the gems are yellow x with lime (x-1) (ex yellow 3 with a lime 2). They do high damage (with the multiplier) to several monsters at once (with chain). Place this far enough away from the mana farm that upgraded levels won't fire into your farm.

the Hadron wall: a line of traps with amps on the sides at the end (but within range of kill towers) with yellow(x) lime(x-1) blue(x-1) or yellow(x) lime(x-1) cyan(x-1) (shock) gems. This is a stiff wall that holds any leakers while it burns them down and also gives the killtowers more time to pound on them. I have had wave 1000+ groups summoned with a lvl20 gem hit the wall and burn up before getting past the first trap.

Why traps for the farm and wall? They give much higher special bonus.

The problem is to get everything working, you generally need to be about level 50 to have enough skill points for all the bonuses, but once you can get 20/20 on mana, crit, chain, and slow, you should be able to start pwning endurance. Once you get 1 endurance past wave 1337 with the endurance multiplier and all the add on's (build 10+ towers, build 10+ shrines....) you can earn 6 to 10 levels (and the pile of skill points that go with it) and defeat your next map on endurance.

One admission is once I get all 3 areas set and running right (around wave 300) I use a bent paper clip to hold down the "n" button (send Next wave) and burn right through to the last wave (1337).

The accepted answer is good, but only late in the game; you need a lot of skill points to fight all giant monster waves. Early on it's better to face all armored; they're almost as slow and not nearly as tough to kill. I used G12 and then B12 as the first fields for levelling up in endurance.

Chain hits in traps on a single target will count as separate hits, making the mana farm incredible. Make sure you always have at least one monster in the trap by gem bombing enough. I got a 1M exp score at Wizard level 30 and immediately leveled me to 300+ish.

My preferred gem would be yellow/red/lime, I have just one of these on the map, but it's 20th grade + 8 amplifiers around. I start off with just red when they're still weak then combine with other colors. it deals about 100k-300k damage now, +100x damage multiplier, 110% bloodbound and chain hit 8 targets. While I haven't beaten Endurance yet, I should be all done by evening, I hope.

I am normally a big fan of bloodbound gems, but not in endurance. Even with 1000 kills and a 200% bloodbound modifier, your base damage goes up by 2000. So your tower that avarages 200k dmg gets a 1% boost indamage for all those kills. Meanwhile, that 3rd color knocked down the %'s for both crit damage and chain. IMO, you are much better off mixing in mana or slow than bloodbound if you to mix anything into your kill towers.
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QuantumKidSep 17 '11 at 1:11

The first time I won endurance was when I was level 23. I just wanted to try, so I used 2,7x battle settings. My mana farm got worthy at wave 40-50 and I was able to craft grade 32 gems by wave 300. I got nearly 700,000 XP and leveled up from 23 to 77. The next endurance I tried was with 11,5x battle settings. I went from level 94 to 311. And later, I won with all settings (no shadow clash) and got 35 million experience. I went from level ~330 to ~700 and got ~4,000 skill points xD.